


Extrasensory

by RandomOneShot



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Allison is going to beat the the Director out the afterlife when she gets her hands on him, Conspiracies, Felix Being a Dick, Mental Breakdown, PTSD, Poor Life Decisions, Psychic powers are real AU, Torture of a digital life form, Washington's career is a black comedy, Wow that is a real tag now, lots of ghosts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-28
Updated: 2016-07-14
Packaged: 2018-07-18 17:47:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7324696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RandomOneShot/pseuds/RandomOneShot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Private Leonard Church honestly thinks that he is a ghost. </p><p>"Dumbass," Allison spits she hovers in front of the oblivious simulation troops and Washington cannot help but agree with her internally.</p><p>(Wherein psychic powers are real and Agent Washington only has trust issues with the living.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In The Beginning....

**Author's Note:**

> My first foray into RvB fic! Here's hoping it turns into one I actually finish.

David did not really notice them at first. It was a just a feeling every now and then like he was being watched or sometimes he half heard something no one else did. It was not a big factor in his childhood, not compared to having to take care of four little sisters with his mom after his father died, not compared to the frequent bed wetting, not compared to the bullies, not… well, not compared to a lot of things.

It was just a weird feeling sometimes.

Then, sometime around his twelfth birthday, it became something else.

 

* * *

 

 

“Mom, there’s a man in the gutter! He’s bleeding bad, call a doctor!” David yelled.

His mother jerked next to him, the groceries almost falling from her hands, and she spun to the left where he was pointing.

For a long moment, David waited breathlessly. The man was curled up in a fetal position and crying, a grown man crying, and the blood had turned the pavement around him into a small red pond that _drip-drip-dripped_ its way down to the sewer beneath him. The man looked up at David’s words, saw the boy looking at him, saw the boy pointing at him, and the joy on his face was as terrible as his sobbing.

But even worse was the shock, the utter _denial_ , that flashed over his pale, bloodied features when David’s mother went ‘tsk’ and turned away to glare at her son.

“David that is a _terrible_ joke to play! You’re grounded for today, young man,” she said. Then she hooked her right arm around both bags and grabbed David’s outstretched arm with her left.

David’s first real meeting with a restless soul ended with him yelling that he was not lying, he’s right there mom, can’t you see him, he’s screaming for help, mom, please, he’s crying mom, can’t you hear him?

 

* * *

  

The grocery store was not far from his school and when he played truant the next day he ran straight for the gutter in front of the double sliding doors. The man was still there, still bleeding and still crying. No one stopped to help him or even turned their head to look at him. It was like he was not there.

(And this is where David, at twelve, first wonders to himself _am I crazy?_ It will not be the last time.)

He considered just leaving, just pretending it had never happened.

Then the man saw him again.

He screamed. “Help me, please help me, please!”

What else could David do but walk forward?

 

* * *

 

 

The man was named Edwin Archarya, he was twenty-nine years old and five days earlier he had watched a pair of paramedics pronounce him dead on site before loading his body into an ambulance and driving away.

David managed to get all of that amidst constant sobbing and frantic thanks. Edwin had been trapped in the gutter he had fallen into ever since that day, unable to leave from the crippling pain he felt every time he attempted to move. No one had heard him screaming either in pain or for help. Everyone had walked passed him or, in some cases, _through_ him.

“I know I’m dead,” he moaned. He had managed to raise himself up to his elbows to try and look David in the eye where he had knelt down to be closer. The people leaving and entering the store flowed around them like water around a rock, a few giving considering looks to the strange boy who was kneeling next to the storm gutter. Anyone who ventured too close seemed to shiver, feeling something of the strange cold that seemed to gather around the gutter. David was surprised his breath was not fogging the air, despite the fact that it was May.

“I know I’m dead, I know it,” Edwin repeated. “I felt all my bones just shatter when that fucker hit me and they’ll have burned my body by now, but I’m still here in this fucking gutter and I can’t get out. I just want to leave. I just want to leave, that’s all I want. I don’t know why I can’t leave.”

David, who had about as much experience with exorcisms as he did with ancient Polynesian languages at that point, said the first thing that came to mind. “Well, do you have any unfinished business?”

Edwin glares at him, bloody and terrifying. “ _Of course_ I have unfinished business, you stupid brat! I was getting my B.S. in chemistry, had about fifty thousand in student loans to pay off, wanted to ask Roxanne if she’d go steady with me, was looking for a better job, had a million movies left to watch – “

David, who was getting more than a bit irritated by that point, violent untimely death or no, interrupted him. “I mean, anything that stands out above the rest? Like, what was the last thing you thought before you died?”

Edwin flinched a bit at that, at the ‘died’, and David felt a flicker of guilt.

“…The guy… who ran into me. Some stupid stock broker looking mother fucker in a mid-life crisis convertible. He peeled out as soon as he saw he’d hit me. I take night classes and only go shopping on my way home, so no one was around when it happened. I’ve been laying here for almost a week now and I never found any cameras by this side of the parking lot. Dunno why, but there you go. I guess… if I had to pick one thing, it’d be that that guy was punished for what he did to me. I mean, he didn’t even get out to check on me. I was still alive for a few seconds there and he could have tried calling for a doctor. Instead he just gunned it and left. The opening workers found me the next day.”

“Do you remember specific anything about him or his car?” David asked.

 

* * *

 

 

Two weeks later, the police arrested a man named Nathanial Calendar on the charge of accidental homicide via a hit and run in the parking lot of the local supermarket. He pleaded not guilty, but the faint traces of blood found on the front end of his vehicle were a match for the blood of the victim, Edwin Archarya. After a month long trial, which included a tearful testimony of the victim’s night route home from his ex-girlfriend, Calendar was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to fifteen years of prison.

Edwin read the article from David’s tablet, his bloodshot eyes eagerly strafing the lines. When he saw the final verdict he sighed and something seemed to release in the air around them. David saw a flicker of something wrapping around Edwin and lifting – pulling – him up to his feet. The blood faded away and the dented pits that marked where his ribs had caved in filled out.

Edwin Archarya, whole and unpained, smiled at David.

“Thanks a lot kid,” he said.

Then he stepped forward towards David, but his eyes focused on something behind David, something that made him smile so wonderfully, and vanished.

David stood there in the parking lot for a long time, long enough that his mother called him and asked if he wanted his dinner in the microwave, but Edwin did not come back and neither did the blood in the gutter.

 

* * *

 

 

Things continued as they had before for the most part.

David told no one of what he had seen and sometimes still saw. He was young, not stupid, and knew that nothing good would come of it. Best case scenario, they ignored him because they thought he was a liar. More likely, they paid attention, but thought he was crazy. Worst would be someone believing him and taking him away from his mom and sisters. He was not bringing that trouble to his own home.

But some things changed.

He paid attention to those half heard whispers, tried to clear his mind around cold spots that never warmed up. Sometimes he would brush his bare skin against an object – and it never seemed to work if it was not bare skin – and a strange phenomena like someone was standing right next to him would come. Sometimes he spoke out to them, tried to reach in a way that defied description in a language that was designed for physicality. Sometimes he received an answer (if you need to do a report on your colony’s history, the graveyard population becomes your new circle of friends), sometimes he did not (his father’s service medal nearly etched a symbol into his palms from how fervently he grasped it every night for six months before giving it up as a failure).

There seemed to be rules – stupid, arbitrary ones, but still rules – about what his abilities (he refused to call them ‘superpowers’ because that called to mind spandex and capes and he was not that much of a nerd, no matter what that cockbite Ryan Whitehall in Mr. Clemmins’ class said) could and could not do:

1 – If they had something left to do, they could not leave until they either let it go or he did it for them. That unfinished business malarkey he had snapped at Edwin in a moment of blind guessing was more accurate than he ever could have thought. Figuring out what that thing was could take some detective work, though.

2 – If he wanted to talk to someone, they had to have unfinished business that they had yet to give up on. The people he had helped – Edwin Archarya, then Millie Malkowitz, Fernando Esquival and nearly a dozen others before he was eighteen – always went on to someplace he could not call them back from, no matter how hard he pushed at that cold place in his mind that always came when he touched something that had significance to them.

3 – Spirits were bound to places, things or people. They had the ability to leap between important things as they wished, but the longer they were away from them, the more they seemed to… _fade_ , as cliché as it was. It varied from person to person, but most could not last more than a few hours away from their important spots.

4 – Physics only existed to spirits if they wanted them to. Carl June had introduced himself to David by hurtling through his second floor bedroom wall at midnight and screaming into David’s face to wake him up.

5 – Spirits only existed to David if he wanted them to. Pulling at the cold spot in his mind seemed to bring them more into focus, but pushing it down with migraine inducing mental concentration seemed to block them from his perception. Sadly, either method could only be used for so long before the throbbing in his head made him relax and stop.

David’s town was a good sized one on a middling sized colony set in the Leonis Minoris system. They did not have a statistically unusual death rate. David could not have said at that point whether or not they had a statistically unusual restless spirit population. Later in life, further evidence would give him plenty of reason to trust that few people died fully satisfied with how things had turned out. As it was back then, he only had to go to the graveyard in his neighborhood and yell good morning for those who remained behind to swarm him for conversation.

He wondered why they could stay behind, what bizarre cosmic design would give them the power to watch the world they had loved but not to interact with it. They were all so ridiculously grateful to be free of regret and pain.

(Millie was the second one and she had been like Edwin, murdered when no one was nearby and forgotten in a pile of cold case records. The stab wounds she had carried on her spirit for five years still bled unceasingly when David had found her in the cemetery, futilely trying to hug her own crying mother. Three days later, when her next door neighbor had been arrested following a search of his house turning up a bloody knife buried in his backyard, they had vanished before David’s eyes and Millie had smiled at him without any hint of grimace or discomfort. “Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you,” she had said unendingly as she faded. They were all like that, grateful beyond belief that it was finally over, that someone had finally been able to help them.)

David did not understand it. Why him? His birthdate was not odd, he had never been experimented on or preformed magic even as a joke; it just seemed to be a random thing. His mother was good at playing darts, his sisters could sing in chorus with no training and he could see the spirits of the restless dead.

If there was someone else who had ever had abilities like him, they had kept a low profile. David’s mother remembered the summer of 2535 as that time David discovered the Internet. He spent months looking through supernatural forums, biographies of self-claimed mediums and legends regarding ghosts from every culture he could find. None of them matched what he was doing.

It bothered him quite a bit, but what was there to do about it? He could not exactly go to a psychiatrist and tell them he was depressed because he had no friends to complain about dead people with. It became one of the very few things David ever attempted to actively forget. It was rather shockingly lonely when he let it get to him and that was not a feeling he was familiar with between his sisters, mother and friends.

So David [REDACTED] reached his eighteenth birthday with a high school diploma, a 3.8 GPA, a history of violent behavior and a thorough practical (if shaky theoretical) understanding of ghosts. Like so many of his classmates, the Human-Covenant war was foremost in his mind. Almost sixty percent of David’s graduating class enlisted straight after graduation and he was no different. He knew what the dangers were, his own father’s untimely death being a constant looming shadow in his household and the threat of never moving on to what came next a stabbing thorn in his brain when he thought about dying. Neither worry stopped him.

On the day he was shipped out to begin basic training on his planet’s moon, David waved goodbye to his mother and sisters, watched them try not break down crying and prayed he would come back to them like their father had not. He did not want to spend eternity lurking in the background of their lives, screaming at them noiselessly that he had not left them.

He would come back, he promised.

He was still staring at them, still rolling those words around and around in his head, when another recruit he did not recognize dropped down onto the seat next to him and said, with no warning or introduction of any kind, “So, I can light things on fire with my mind. How about you?”

…What?

 


	2. A Smaller World Than He Thought

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> David is, so far as he knows, the only actual psychic in the entire universe. 
> 
> The universe thinks this is hilarious.

Sheer confusion halted David’s brain for several precious seconds. When he could think again, he saw a young man about his own age smiling at him and waiting eagerly for a reply.

“I’m sorry, what?” David asked, more for confirmation that he was awake than any lack of hearing on his part.

“I’m,” the boy said, then stopped suddenly, seeming to only then remember that they were in a crowded transport shuttle. “Ah, you know what? It can wait. I’m Ingimárr Yating Romagnoli, nice to meet you. Do you have anything to eat?”

 

* * *

 

 

The boy, who insisted on being called Yate “because I fucking hate being called Ingi”, continued to badger David for personal details and freely share his own for the entirety of the two hour ride. Every second David listened to the strange boy next to him, his internal paranoia alarm only grew louder and louder. The second he set foot on a military shuttle, someone identified him as a… whatever he was and happened to be one as well? _Bullshit._

By the time the shuttle touched down on the moon’s surface, David was ready to leap for the cockpit and force the pilot to take him back at knifepoint. He knew beyond any reasonable doubt that he was going to be dragged off to some laboratory somewhere to be dissected or taken to some black ops facility and turned into a soulless killing machine for some faceless general. Yate was just the front guy, someone they sent to locate and soften up their targets before yanking them away into the dark.

Except they landed without issue, were grouped into their barracks without issue and passed the day filling out paperwork without issue, so no, Yate was just really friendly and also had powers, but no tact.

At night, the lights went out and David lay in his unfamiliar cot feeling deeply homesick and completely wired. Around midnight, Yate rose from his cot and motioned in the dark towards their bathroom. More out of curiosity than anything else, David followed him.

Their barrack had a set of toilet and shower stalls in a row at the back behind a cheap plastic wall. There was a door to shut it, but no lock. David just hoped no one had to take a piss in the next ten minutes. Yate, meanwhile, was bouncing up and down on his feet and grinning widely. He seemed absurdly pleased with himself for waiting as long as he had. Abruptly, David felt all of the nervousness that had filled his day morph into anger.

“Okay, what the _actual fuck_ is wrong with you?!” David hissed.

Yate blinked and the enthusiasm visibly drained from his face. “Uh, sorry? What did I do?”

“Who walks up to someone and introduces himself as the guy who burns things with his mind? _In public?!_ What if someone had heard you?”

Yate lost his depression and smiled a little bit again. “Oh, that? Dude, it’s okay. I talked about this stuff all the time with my grandma and everybody who did think it was odd believed us when we said it was a game or a book we were reading or whatever. If they don’t see it, no one cares.”

“You don’t know that,” David snapped, his mind still whirling between _I might not be fucked_ and _this guy is an idiot_.

“Well, there are these conspiracy guys who think we’re trying to outbreed regular humans and brainwash them and shit, but they’re loonies and mostly harmless…. Wait, did you mean like government spooks or some – wait, _am I the first other psychmmmph?!_ ” Yate nearly yelled and David had his hand over Yate’s mouth so fast he could barely believe his own speed.

“Keep. Your. Voice. Down,” David ground out between his teeth.

Whatever Yate saw in David’s face was enough to punch through to whatever survival instinct remained in his brain. He quickly nodded his head and David pulled his hand back. Yate stared at him blankly, quiet for a whole minute, and then spoke again, much more restrained than before.

“Dude, seriously, I’m the first, aren’t I?” Yate asked, his tone disbelieving.

Still unsure, but more ready to believe that Yate did not actually mean any harm, David nodded.

“Fuck, no wonder you acted so twitchy,” Yate said pityingly. “Did you think I was gonna bring the men in white down on you? I just wanted to talk shop.”

“You just sat down next to me and said you could light things on fire with your mind,” David reminded him. “I’ve never had anyone show even the slightest bit of psychic anything aside from me and then the second I get ready to ship out and go away from almost everyone I know, I meet another one. It… it just seemed like really odd timing.”

“I get it,” Yate said. “But, no one in your family? No one? Because my family’s had people tossing sparks out as far back as we can trace ourselves.”

“No,” David said. Granted, he only had living relatives on his mother’s side, so perhaps it came from his father. There was no way of asking them, not unless he felt like traveling to Istvan to peruse his ancestor’s graves and see if anyone answered his calls.

“Sucks,” Yate judged bluntly. “I had my grandma to teach me what’s what and complain to on bad days. I found a few more people later on, too. I can get you on our support website if you want.”

Something in David’s brain _grinded_ to a shrieking halt. “You… You have a support website? For people like us?”

“Yeah. I mean, it’s kind of informal and basic, just a chatroom and some info sheets for new psychics who need advice on what they can do, and why is your face turning that color? Dude?!”

 

* * *

 

 

Eventually, David calmed down. Eventually, he managed to spit out that he had spent months, years even, trying to find help and someone to talk to who understood. Yate nodded sympathetically and patted his shoulder and waited politely for David to finish bitching before he began again with his insensitive informing.

“Yeah, okay, your first problem? Seriously thinking we were going to put our web page name as ‘psychic helpline.’ Most people don’t believe this shit like I said, but there are some who do and for every one hundred crazies who wear tinfoil hats and live in the middle of nowhere with no friends, there is someone who has a working brain and money who would _really_ like to find us. We’re pretty good about looking after each other, but bad things happen sometimes.”

“Bad things?” David asked, his heartbeat picking up again.

“Kidnapping, extortion, slavery, murder,” Yate said bluntly. “One of my grandma’s friends was a postcog. He could see the past, you know? Some cockwaffle grabbed him and held him prisoner for six months, had him getting people’s account numbers, computer passwords, dirty secrets; shit like that. All he needed was something they had touched while they were using the information. Grandma and a few others eventually found him and broke him out, but it still sucked. That’s why we try to avoid doing anything online that can be traced back our physical locations. That website I mentioned is officially used for a massive LARP game that we’ve had going on for almost two decades. Unofficially, it’s a psychic chatroom. You need an invite from a member to get in. Anyone else won’t be admitted.”

David did not answer. All he could see was the worst fears that had ever drifted through his mind, of faceless people breaking into his home and taking him away, taking his sisters and mother away.

Yate must have seen something of his fears on his face because he knelt down and tapped a finger against David’s forehead to make him look up.

“Dude, seriously, it’s okay. Like I said, we keep track of each other. We’ve got cops and private investigators and soldiers and even some ONI guys on our side, so nobody’s gonna get you without pissing off about a thousand telepaths, telekinetics, clairvoyants and some other people with powers I can’t even pronounce. And I can burn steel. So, it’s fine.”

What?

David was not very well up on the burning point of metals, but he was pretty sure steel did not melt for anything less than a stupidly high amount of heat. That kind of power, in Yate’s hands? David had known him for all of maybe twelve hours, but it was a terrifying thought.

“You melt steel?” David repeated.

Yate smirked and held up his cupped palm. “You’re doubting me? Can’t you feel it in me, like I did in you?”

And again, _what_?

But then all confusion vanished from David’s mind, as he could only stare.

Fire, dazzlingly bright in the darkness of the bathroom, flared into existence in Yate’s uncovered hand. In a matter of seconds, David saw it shift from red-orange, to yellow-orange, to blue and then to a white so bright he had to shut his eyes. But the strangest thing was, he felt no heat all.

“Dude, I have _so fucking much_ to teach you,” Yate said with glee, snuffing his flame by closing his hand. “This is going to be awesome. And seriously, what can you do? You never answered me.”

“Um, I’m a medium,’ David said numbly, his eyes still locked onto Yate’s completely unburnt hand. “My name’s David.”

Yate blinked. “Is your middle name Cole?”

“No. Why did you think it would be?”

“Cuz you see dead people.”

“Oh my god, _shut up.”_

 

* * *

 

Days flow into weeks and then months. Basic training sucked just as much as everyone said it would and then some. David’s graduating class had split up between those who wanted to join the navy, the marines, a few who went into medical training, some who chose intelligence work from the recruiters who stalked through the senior classes like wolves and the two-fifths or so who chose to remain in the civilian workforce or go on to higher education. About seventy of his year mates had gone into the marines with David and he had maybe four of them in his group after they were split up. The rest were from other towns on the planet, Yate among them. None of them were what David would call friends, but familiarity had them grouping together during the few moments of free time to bitch to each other about their clearly possessed drill sergeant and various other disappointments. However, by far and away the person David spent the most time with was Yate.

Getting time alone was all but impossible. Most of their conversations occurred in the same bathroom as they had that first night. The few times they spoke about their powers in the daylight, it was always as though they were speaking about a role-playing game.

(That was mostly at David’s insistence.

“Dude, I’m telling you, no one here will give one single, solitary fuck if we talk about psychic powers. Nathans has that huge comic collection, he’s always yammering on about laser beams from someone’s eyes, or girls who can grow tentacles from their vag, no one’s gonna blink if we talk about ghosts and shit.”)

What Yate had was, as David had first thought, pyrokinesis, but it was a bit more complicated than only controlling fire. Yate could actually control heat of all levels, either dragging it together to ignite the air or spreading it out to cool off.

(By happy coincidence, their barrack had perfect internal room temperature for the entire three month duration of their residence in it. No one dared to mention it to any of their officers, for fear that their supposedly undefeatable air conditioning unit would be confiscated to replace the notoriously shoddy ones that littered every other building on the base. Yate thought it was hilarious and felt like he should have been paid.)

His range was somewhat shorter than David’s was for ghosts, only extending about thirty yards in any direction. The further out it went, the weaker his grip on the heat got. If it was at skin level though? If anything, Yate had been modest when he said he could melt steel. _Tungsten_ melted in his hands.

“It’s hard to go this high,” Yate admitted as David watched in horrified awe at the white hot droplets that ran down from his hands. They had begged a piece of a rail gun round from a navy ship that had stopped in to resupply and the very bemused gunner had found them a small chunk that had been wriggled loose from his cannon during its last maintenance.

“Because of how much heat you’re generating?” David guessed.

“No, because of how much heat I’m holding back,” Yate corrected.

Suddenly even more scared, David wordlessly looked at Yate for an explanation.

“Well, I have all this heat generating and that’s kind of difficult, but keeping it all contained in this one little area?” Yate raised an eyebrow down at his hands. “That’s the bitch. It wants to rise and expand and I’m telling it no. The more heat I make, the harder it gets.”

“…Yate, do you actually have a limit on how much heat you can make?” David asked, a terrifying possibility entering his mind.

And as he feared, Yate only hummed, tilting his head back and forth as he thought about it.

“Probably? I mean, I have a limit on how much I can make _safely_.”

(David sent a letter to his very confused mother that night. “If my base ever burns up in a fiery inferno exceeding that of a white-hot sun, I want you to blame Yate. I assure you, it was somehow his fault.”)

 

* * *

 

 

David’s powers are less easily shown off.

“Okay, where am I looking?” Yate squinted in the direction David pointed.

“She’s literally two feet in front of you,” David said, trying not to sound exasperated.

“Hello,” Lance Corporal Goizeder Hamilton sang as she waved a hand in front of Yate’s face. She was a nice woman, although the mess of her exposed skull and brain made her somewhat daunting to stare at.

There were plenty of dead people at the base, more than David had ever seen outside of his town’s cemetery. Some were people who had been injured and shipped back to recover, only to die in the hospital. Others, like the good lance corporal, had been the victims of live fire exercises, equipment malfunctions or the general retardation of their fellow soldiers. A very small number even came back from far off deaths because they had been here so long as to consider it their home and thus a place of Importance.

That had been one of the easier things to explain about the dead – the Unfinished Business and the Important Things. Yate had taken the news that at least some of his ancestors were likely still hanging around his two hundred year old house fairly well. He said it was not likely anyone related to him was interested in spying on him in the bathroom and that was really the only thing he cared about.

(David remembered Carl June invading his bedroom at midnight, screaming “Wake the fuck up kid, I’ve gotta talk to you!” at the top of his ethereal lungs and decided not to break Yate’s oblivious trust in dead people.)

Not everything had been so easy to relate, however.

 

* * *

 

  

“Wait, you can turn it off?” Yate asked disbelievingly. His cup was hanging halfway to mouth, the urge to drink forgotten.

“For a little while,” David said. “It starts to make my head ache after a bit though, so I can’t do it all the time. You?”  

“Nope,” Yate answered. He took a deep gulp of the (probably) tap water that they were given during lunch and swallowed noisily. “I mean, I can just not use it, but I’ve never been able to just get rid of it. Not even for a second. How do you do it?”

What followed was an exercise in frustration that ended with them running twenty laps around the landing pad. The fire had not actually spread very far, Yate thankfully being just as good at stopping them as he was at starting them, but it was the fourth such event that they were caught near and even if there had been no hard evidence, David was pretty sure their sergeant had them both pegged as arsonists.

 

* * *

 

 

There was one thing that they could both do, however.

In hindsight, David could never remember feeling disbelief at Yate’s claim that he could burn things by willing it. Confusion and fear, definitely, but not disbelief. It was not until Yate took his hand that he understood why.

There was a sort of… _spark_ that made the cold spot in David’s mind tingle. It was impossible to ignore when Yate was touching him, but it faded away to almost unnoticeable levels when Yate stepped away. _Almost_ unnoticeable. On some level, David’s mind knew there was another psychic nearby.

“I call it psydar,” Yate said, without an ounce of shame at his sheer nerdiness. “There isn’t really an actual name for it, I think. I’ve had other people tell me it’s our common sixth sense or a spiritual connection, but psydar just gets the message across better, you know?”

David simply said, “No,” unwilling to let this magnificent discovery be given such a stupid name. While Yate growled at him that psydar was a totally perfect name and who was more educated on this shit, damn well not you, David delved into years of practice at ignoring things he did not want to notice and simply focused on that wonderful shivering sensation in the back of his mind, a tangible sensation telling him that he was not alone.

 

* * *

 

 

His lack of free time meant that there was not much chance to help the restless dead on the base, but David did what he could. A few of them were simple enough – Private Falut wanted him to send a letter to his parents saying he loved them and forgave them for the fight, Private Lee wanted her father’s knife back from the prick C.O. who took it for his own from her effects, Private Derling wanted him to dump a whole tub of ketchup into the water tank of barrack C-2 for one last prank – but there were some that he either could not or would not do.

A horrible number of them were waiting for the war to end with human victory and if that did not happen, David was pretty sure they would be there for a few hundred years before they could finally let it go. One disgusting bastard wanted revenge on the man who killed him, a horribly bullied squad mate that every other spirit he had spoken to assured him was completely in the right to defend himself lethally. That miserable shit went ballistic when David told him to fuck off and it took four other spirits to pull him away. It then took a rotating duty of five spirits every day to ensure he stayed away from David for the remainder of his basic training. Although no dead soul could lay hands on a living one, he was still capable of blocking David’s vision, screaming at him without end and being a general pain in the ass twenty-four/seven.

“Why is he still after that guy? He’s had all this time to think about what he did. Doesn’t he feel even the slightest bit like letting it go?” David asked.

“Being dead does not mean we’re peaceful, self-reflecting monks, sweetie,” Major Kelling said softly as her old medical unit left the parade ground to go to their shift on ‘asshole-repellent duty’ as Yate called it when he found out. It was two days after such a thing had been deemed necessary almost unanimously by every single ghost on the base. “I expect you’ll meet some more like him before you join us. Bitter fucks who only want one more chance to rip someone apart, whether they deserve it or not.”

David looked at the old nurse, her face charred grotesquely from the plasma that killed her. She was waiting, had been waiting for years, to see someone in her old company make it back to base from the destruction of her ship, the _Dawning Potential._ Over fifty of them were still unaccounted for and David did not think they would be coming back. Either they had other Important Places than the lunar base Major Kelling had called home or they had moved on.

“What do you think I should do?” David asked.

“Ask for help,” she said. “You’re the one person who has a chance of helping us, the one person who can move things in the living world on our behalf. David, I know you get uncomfortable when people thank you for helping them, just like I know you do it because you think it’s the right thing to do and no other reason. That’s great, but you need to stop being so humble.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, use us to help. If a dead asshole’s bothering you, get a protection detail like we’re doing now. Use us to scout ahead, gain intelligence on the enemy and area. Ask for advice on your training. Ask which officers and soldiers are trustworthy and which you should stay away from. Ask us anything at all. _We will do it for you_. We are an army of invisible, intangible military personnel and I don’t think I’ve ever heard tell of you getting anything back for helping us. Do you see what I’m getting at here?”

David shifted uncomfortably under her eye sockets’ empty gaze. “I…. It’s not… right to ask for payment for something like this, I think.”

She sighed. “Oh save me from goody two-shoes like you. Private David Dumbass, I am your superior and I am giving you a goddamn order, so listen: _this. Is. An. Advantage. Use. It. Moron._ I fucking guarantee you, you will need everything you can use against the Covies. Do I need to remind you what the survival rate for new meat is?”

She did not, in fact.

“You’ve got that crazy flamethrower boy backing you up and that’s a start, but sweety, we are more versatile by far. You’ve got dead engineers, dead doctors, dead snipers, dead scouts, dead commanders, dead pilots - do I need to go on? Fucking use them. I guarantee you, they won’t mind a chance to help out.”

David had always felt that his abilities were more for the dead than him. He was just a delivery boy, trying to bring them the ticket to their final destination. The idea of using other people as his own personal army left a twisting feeling in his gut. It was all right if they willing, right? Like Kelling had said, they would be helping each other. It was not extortion. No way.

(It did not make the feeling go away.)

Later that night, when they had disappeared into the bathroom again and Yate was amusing himself by flinging tame fireballs around the room, David looked up at him and asked if it was all right to ask the dead to work for him, even temporarily, when he was holding so much power over them.

Yate had stopped in mid catch, the fire winking out as he instinctively snuffed the flame, and stared at him in astonishment. “You mean you weren’t already?”

Which said it all, really.

 

* * *

 

 

To people who had harmed him, David would nurse grudges like a motherfucker. To people who looked to him for help, he was almost ridiculously selfless. Yate had a good two weeks to try to break him out of that mindset before they shipped out to see actual combat, but it remained mostly true even as David boarded the _Northern Light_ to leave the Leonis Minoris system. Unheard by anyone but him, almost a thousand voices roared encouragement and well wishes at his back.

“You okay?” Yate asked, looking concerned when David staggered slightly at the farewell noise.

“Yeah. They’re just, uh, wishing me good luck,” David said quietly, heat rising to his face.

“Must be nice to be so popular,” Yate said cheerfully. “Let’s hope the next batch likes you as much.”

 

* * *

 

  

The next batch would, in fact, like him just as much. As would the ones after them and the ones after them. Ghosts would flicker between battlefields, between worlds, whispering of a boy who could see them, who could let them fight one more time even if in spirit, who could pass on their wishes, their messages, everything they had failed to finish as they left life behind.

(Somewhere in the universe, a young redheaded girl landed in a warzone and sprinted forward with her rifle firing, her squad mates at her sides and struggling to keep up. Behind her, a blond woman in seared and filthy fatigues yelled fruitlessly, “Conserve your energy, damn it, what did they teach you in basic?!”)

But all of that is later.  

Right then, there is David, there is Yate and there is the certainty that death is something that only bothers other people.

(That will not last.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we're off to the Great War! I'm trying to get to the good stuff without skipping over too much in between. I'm filling in everything that I think needs to be in, but if something seems rushed or confusing, please let me know.

**Author's Note:**

> So, I was re-watching RvB after leaving it for a few years (I stopped back after the season 10 finale and did not pick it up again until May of this year) and picked up a few things in hindsight that I did not really care or notice about before. 
> 
> For instance, way back in season 1 Caboose says to Tucker, "It's almost like we are real soldiers." I guess this was supposed to just be a one off joke about Caboose not really thinking they were actually competent or something, but in light of the simulation bases it struck me as very odd. Why would he think that? ..Oh, did he know about Project Freelancer somehow? Well, he couldn't have. He was just a failed private. ...Wait, no, WHAT IF HE CAN SEE THE FUTURE?! 
> 
> And also how the hell would Wash know Church wasn't a ghost just like that UNLESS HE KNEW ACTUAL GHOSTS AND THEY WOULD LAUGH THEIR ASSES OFF IF THEY HEARD THIS YOU STUPID PILE OF MATH!
> 
> So, this was born.


End file.
